steady state

We’re going to the mountains tomorrow for a week of cross country skiing. So I went to the supermarket to stock up on chocolate and energy bars. I like to have them with me when I go on the long ski run with the kids. It is always good to have some fast sugar with you, in case some of the kids forget to take their own.

Of course I had to buy these when I saw them. I will eat a lot of them and see if they make me as fast as Ondřej Synek:

After the shopping, I did a 75 minute workout on Zwift/PainSled.

I took a few screenshots. As an OTW rower, I like to be in the outdoors, but “cycling” the erg through a virtual landscape, while interacting with other virtual cyclists, is not bad:

Tomorrow, we leave for the Jesenik mountains. I am looking forward to it. Two rowing clubs. About thirty people. Friends. Great X country trails. Here is my blog post from when we did the same a year ago.

The title of this blog refers to a Zwift notification that I saw during the row.

On Friday, I came home from work and wasn’t really in the mood or shape for a workout. I decided for a rest day. I finished some stuff on the rowsandall.com site, and then opened a bottle of wine and had a nice evening with Romana and the kids. We flipped through some old photo albums. Some rowing albums from my juniors and U23 days.

Today, I had time enough for a longer steady state row, and I decided to finally try and get PainSled and Zwift to communicate.

It turned out to be a no-brainer. I ran PainSled on the iPhone and Zwift on the iPad. In the Zwift app, the iPhone shows up as a iPhone Power Source, which you select.

I selected a ride that was called “Paris – Roubaix” and expected to be riding through Paris and the North of France. Instead, I was dropped in an artificial landscape where coast, mountains and city are all very close together.

Lots of riders around. Not the usual emptiness of RowPro land. I stopped the row at one point for a screenshot, but the empty road in front of me is not really representative.

PainSled seems to increase the power it sends to Zwift. While my PM was showing 190-200W, Zwift was reporting 220-240W and I seemed to be faster than most riders.

I finished much faster than the predicted 60 minutes, so I did two rounds, amounting to 50 “km” on Zwift and almost 20km on the PM.

The Polar OH1 had some funny behavior in the first five minutes of the row.

I couldn’t help but try and ride with a guy in an orange Jersey with the text “Ride is on”, so that explains the higher Watts around 40 minutes. And again, in the final part of the ride, there was a guy in a green jersey doing the same thing.

Anyway, the row/ride was big fun. There were a few riders around with approximately the same speed, so there was some interaction ongoing. Those other guys are training on bike trainers, I presume, so for them it was a little easier to interact with the app. I just rowed. The others were throwing around “thumb-ups” and short chat messages.

It was also nice to see the landscape change and go through turns. I didn’t lean to one side on the erg in the turns, though.

A good way to make the time go by fast. I may do another one tomorrow.

To make it a bit more interesting, I added a mental arithmetic challenge.

After 1000m of rowing, I took the power of the stroke at which I crossed 1000m, in Watts, and subtracted 100. I multiplied that number by my heart rate minus 100.

I got

188-100 = 88
128-100 = 29
------------ x
3534

So I rowed to 3534m, where I did the same arithmetic with the value at that moment:

3534 + (97x56) = 8964

So I rowed to 8964m, where I had to calculate:

8964 + (86x62) = 14196

In fact, I made errors on all the calculations, so the numbers above are just as an example (although the meter values are approximately right).

Anyway, it was good fun and I realized I need to restore my mental math skills. I am pretty good at estimating and I used to be slightly faster than gents with calculators, back when I was a Ph.D. student and estimating skills and mental arithmetic were a handy skill to have have.

Yes, I do realize that this is not everybody’s idea of fun, but it works for me. The hour was over in no time.

I succeeded in getting home from work early enough to get in a workout before dinner. Dialed up a standard 20 minute interval at one minute rest. I was afraid that doing this as a “Just Row” would tempt me to stop somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes in. With the intervals, I always feel obliged to finish the interval, so that would guarantee that I would row at least 60 minutes.

I did finish all the intervals, and I did it at a better power than I had expected. I concluded that I am back at the level of 2 seasons ago, where I did all my steady state between 195 and 200W.

rPower is the normalized power, which is an interesting metric. It basically says that the 3 minutes of rest, which brought down the overall average power to 193W, can be ignored, and the workout is virtually equivalent of rowing 63 minutes without breaks at 196W.

Heart Rate drift slightly higher than normal. Normally, I am in the 5-7% range. It may have been just an artefact of me slacking down on power in the final three minutes.

Note that I did row at lower stroke rates than prescribed. To break the boredom, I did rate ladders, starting at 18, up to 22spm, than oscillating between 21spm and 20spm, and finally down again.

Tuesday

The plan was another steady state session, but there was a guy doing a quick repair on one of our Water Closets. Long story short: The quick repair turned out to be a total replacement of the WC, which I needed to assist with, including driving to the hardware store to buy the thing.

Perhaps carrying old WC down the stairs and new WC up the stairs can count as strength training?

Monday

A light hour of steady state on the erg, right after breakfast. Still hurting a lot from the Saturday and Sunday sessions, so I took it a lot easier than I would normally do on these steady state sessions.

Then I headed to the railway station, took the 11:38 train to Hamburg via Prague, Dresden, Berlin. I usually travel by plane, and this train trip was a very nice variation. I love that you have enough leg space, power, USB plugs, and can go to the restaurant wagon whenever you like. I spent most of the time making notes for my speech, then writing out my speech, then condensing it to notes again. It’s how I have learned to prepare and memorize. If I do it well, I can throw away the notes, but I usually like to have them around.

On the train, I also looked at my erging data for the past few sessions.

The Saturday session sticks out. I didn’t split up this session in rest and work strokes, so the averages are pretty skewed, but the top values in the box chart are definitely different than those for a normal session. I was expecting that for “work per stroke” and average and maximum force, but apparently also the stroke length was distorted. Interesting …

Arrived at Hamburg pretty late, took the S-Bahn to my hotel, called my wife, crashed in bed.

Tuesday

Slept too long to do any exercise, and spent the little time I had to have a good breakfast and go through my speech one more time, delivering it to my hotel room. The hotel room didn’t say much, so I guess it was OK. It was a bit short, about 10 minutes shorter than the 40 minutes that I was expected to speak. I guessed that the audience being more interactive than the bed and empty chairs in my hotel room, and leaving a couple of minutes for questions and answers, I would be fine.

Joined the conference, listened to a couple of interesting talks, had lunch, and then it was time for me to deliver my part.

I had just asked a critical question to the previous speaker, and the chairman made a lengthy introduction. To break the ice, I expressed the fear that the chairman (and myself, with my question) had raised the expectation a little too high, and then I started with my intro.

Getting some nods and comments, and expanding a bit on a couple of points that were already raised by previous speakers, I filled the 40 minutes easily. A guy form Alitalia had a few interesting questions and comments, and that was it. Job done. I like to talk about the work that my guys do, but I have to have the time to prepare well.

In the evening, we were invited to drinks and dinner, and I had a good time. The drinks were served inside the airport, on one of the upper levels. This was approximately the view from where we were having our drinks:

Because I had been a speaker, people would come and talk to me, and comment on my talk, which was nice. Met a few of our suppliers. Sneaked out of the party around 10pm, walked back to the hotel through the rainy and windy Hamburg weather, and went to bed.

Wednesday

Set alarm clock for 6am so I could get in some exercise before breakfast. For such an expensive hotel, the Radisson Blu Hamburg Airport, the gym wasn’t much. A few elliptical and a few stationary bikes. Spent 15 minutes on each, then went back to my hotel room and completed the session with 20 minutes of body weights exercises.

I have started to use an app called HRV4Training, which supposedly measures Heart Rate Variability (HRV). You use it each morning. It measures your pulse through the smartphone camera and derives HRV, and something called “Recovery Points”, which I can sync to SportTracks. It also asks questions about travel and alcohol consumption.

For three days I have used it, and my scores have been constantly improving, while I traveled to Germany, trained and slept irregularly, and there was alcohol consumption. Still, my resting heart rate and my “recovery points” keep improving.

Will continue to use it a bit longer to see if it discovers any trends.

I spent the rest of the day at the conference, including an evening workshop.

Thursday

Up at 5 to catch the S-Bahn to the railway station. I had noticed that there was an entrance to the S-Bahn right in front of the hotel, but when I wanted to take it, I noticed the sign that this entrance was closed. Had to walk a long distance to another entrance to the same station, and missed my train. Luckily, I had built in quite some reserve, so even with the next train, twenty minutes later, I had plenty of time at the Hamburg station to take a coffee and some pastry.

Now, I am in the train, between Berlin and Dresden. I hope to arrive to Brno around 5pm, and I hope to get in a steady state erg session. Probably not one with impressive splits, though.